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Top1. Introduction
There has been a sudden change in the dynamics of workforce behavior due to the outbreak of the pandemic COVID-19 (Banerjee, 2020; Prem et al., 2020). Many organizations have rushed up with work from home policies in a very short span of time (Nicola et al., 2020). Though many companies already had well-established work from home policies, implementing them for all the employees in such a serious situation has been an overwhelming task (Awotunde et al., 2021a). Almost all the sectors of work and production were affected by the pandemic (Glover et al., 2020; Guerrieri et al., 2020). For example, sectors such as automobile, real estate, electronics and other manufacturing units got severely affected forcing them to resort to remote working so that their minimum activity is maintained (Roy et al., 2020). Sports sector is the most affected one as it is not possible to accumulate huge crowd in the current situation (Nicola, 2020). On the contrary food and health sectors are overloaded due to their huge demand (del-Rio-Chanona et al., 2020; Ranney et al., 2020).
During this COVID-19 pandemic, working from home becomes extremely challenging with small children around, unsuitable spaces, lack of privacy and no other choice (Adediran, 2020). It becomes a monotonous routine of balancing the children, family, home and the office work. Due to the closure of schools, the students have online learning programmes which are forcing the parents to take up their studies completely and help them with their activities and projects (Bayham and Fenichel, 2020; Basilaia and Kvavadze, 2020). This added responsibility is extremely tiring for the parents working from home. Work from home become very difficult for the women work force, especially the mothers, as they need to put in more time for caring and other home responsibilities. When the needed flexibility is not provided to them by the organization they are forced to opt out of the work force (Spurk and Straub, 2020). The situation becomes worse when the parent is single as the responsibility of home, taking care of the kids and work front falls on a single person and they don’t get any help due to the current pandemic (Chung et al., 2020).
Working from home may at times be very depressing (Holmes et al., 2020). It may cause a feeling of loneliness and boredom leading to poor productivity in the work. Frequent monitoring through phone calls and conference calls may not help with the situation as it may not reveal the original condition of the person.
Information technology has taken a during this ongoing pandemic situation (Arowolo et al., 2021). Businesses are heavily dependent on the information technology enablement of their employees to ensure continuity and minimum disruption to critical operations/projects (Awotunde et al., 2021b). The sudden and unprecedented shift to work-from-home due to COVID-19 resulted in creating tremendous pressure for employers to ensure employees working remotely have the right technology collaboration tools, basic infrastructure which is reliable, scalable and flexible. Organization need to formulate a robust and secure information and communication protocol which has to be very clear without any ambiguity, transparent, easily accessible, flexible and very supportive (Gössling et al., 2020). The employees need to understand their roles very clearly in the ongoing situation, while working on multiple projects, since the IT industry’s business model in developing countries such as India is majorly driven by projects. Several software development projects experienced a jolt in their work-in-progress due to the unprecedented lockdown, forcing re-allocation and shifting of resources from huge office spaces to small work spaces at employees’ homes. The agile development projects which are known to be adaptive and lean, too faced the challenges of coordination and collaboration between teams (Butt et al., 2021).
The Human resources department need to prepare policies and protocols such that the employees are prepared for the changes that are going to occur in their jobs and their relocation if necessary (Brindle and Gawande, 2020). The policies in this situation should make the employees feel secure by making them feel safe, providing them online training, flexible timings and always make them feel a part of the company. Though this situation doesn’t affect the knowledge workers it surely affects the workers in the lower rungs of the organizational hierarchy.